By acting out latent thoughts, memories and fantasies, Thorneycroft’s transgressive art prods and exposes suppressed desire, taboos and fears. In Untitled (& if she wakes), Thorneycroft poses in the cliché of the reclining odalisque, but Western art’s motif of display of the female form for the desiring male gaze is transformed into a troubled sleep amid disordered abundance and the ethereal beauty of psychological disturbance. Diana Thorneycroft uses staged photographs to explore sexuality and memory, much informed by feminist and psychoanalytic theory. Thorneycroft stages props to create explicit scenarios: masks and false body parts, and the artist’s use of her own muscular androgynous body, create ambiguity of gender. A dramatic lighting technique of self illumination by flashlight before the open shutter generates a mysterious, almost surreal effect of distortion and violent chiaroscuro.

Based in Winnipeg, Thorneycroft holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba (1979) and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980).